Sunday, August 18, 2013

Three of the all-time best breakup books

In this painfully beautiful book, Salter somehow manages to capture the lushness of a thriving marriage and its simultaneous decline. (“Life is weather. Life is meals. Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.”) He conjures the gorgeousness of daily life, the rhythms of love, of a worn and comfortable familiarity along with the wordless restlessness, the growing discontents. (“ … and he reads to them, as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning the earth at their feet.”) Somehow we see in this elaborately complex portrait of domestic life both the greatness and transcendent possibility of family, and the crashing insufficiency of it, which is an astonishing, nearly impossible literary feat. The book is ultimately about how happiness and restlessness collide, about the ends entwined in beginnings, the imperceptible changes of heart, the nascent elegies embedded in our warmest, safest, happiest moments. If the real question we want answered in breakup novels is how a vivid, pressing love fades, this book comes closer than any other I have ever read to answering it.